Strange to see the word "snuffles" in the sense of "shuffles."
Or maybe not.
>>>Earlier this summer, on a drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I went to see the octopuses at Monterey Bay Aquarium. At the time Monterey’s permanent octopus exhibit housed two Giant Pacifics, though there were more octopuses in its temporary show Tentacles, the largest ever exhibition of cephalopods. This was my second encounter with a live octopus. (I have had more encounters with dead octopuses at the dinner table than I care to recall. They make excellent carpaccio. Never again.) The first was off a beach in Mykonos, where I was snorkelling. There wasn’t much on the sea floor, just small crustaceans and darting silver fish, until I saw a red mass a few feet away, about the size of a cat, watching me with a single eye. I stayed still, watching it back. The octopus made small, unhurried movements, curling and uncurling its arms, snuffling along the floor. Eventually it crawled to a sunken rope some feet away and wrapped itself around it. Its body became a brown, barnacled coil, and then there was only a single white eye with a black dash of pupil. The eye closed, and the octopus vanished.<<<
The Sucker, the Sucker! lrb.co.uk |